A Word A Day: Shields
by LunaStorm
Summary: The Ministry Six try their hand at Occlumency, with varied results.
1. Kaleidoscope

Luna's mind is not suited to shields and barriers.

She is too used to accept, to welcome – ideas and people and mysteries and creatures few can see and the infinite myriad of possibilities of the many many futures around her, multiplying and ever-changing and unravelling and reforming.

She understands, however, the importance of protecting her mind, her thoughts, her secrets.

She has friends now, and they can be hurt if she's careless.

But it's alright.

She can't put enclosures and boned threads and brick walls around her mind – that's just _not her_ – but just because a place is welcoming doesn't mean it's actually pleasant to be in.

Her mind is a maze of mirrors all reflecting one another, confusing and distorting and altering in an endless feast of colours and sands and ideas and memories and fantasies and music and things that were, blending into things that are, blending into things that will perhaps come to pass, twisting and changing and busting in fireworks of sparkling colours and she knows, her secrets are safe, her friends protected.

For who but her could hope to sort through that beautiful, captivating, headache-inducing kaleidoscope?

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	2. Garden

Neville has taken to Occlumency surprisingly well and he has a Muggle book – a gift from Hermione – to thank for the beautiful form his mindscape is taking under his watchful care.

The book told of a hidden garden, shut away from the world by high walls covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses, so thick that they were matted together; a Secret Garden whose tiny door could only be unlocked by a key long lost.

His mind's key isn't lost, but he alone can touch it and no one else will ever see his Garden.

It is safe.

And it is growing.

At first, it was frozen, sleeping, the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown, neither leaves nor flowers adorning the bushes, telling whether they were dead or alive, and thin grey or brown branches spreading like a sort of hazy mantle over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground.

It wasn't dead, no: but the pulsing life of its trees and bulbs was hidden from view, out of reach.

He loves plants, however, and he has the slow, trusting patience of gardeners everywhere, and lovingly cares for his mind's Garden.

He feeds and waters the buds and keeps watch over them, and cuts the dry and dead wood away, and digs about roots, and stirs the earth to let the air in, and finds all of the lifeless-looking boughs or twigs that still have green life in them and coaxes them back into the warming sun, until the Garden loses the aspect of a place which has been left all by itself for too long.

Slowly, spring comes. And stays.

Now plants bloom and flowers blossom everywhere and each of them represents a memory, a thought, a notion.

He coaxes climbing roses to run all over the trees and swing down long tendrils which make light swaying curtains, here and there catching at each other or at a far-reaching branch and creeping from one tree to another and making lovely bridges of themselves, connecting every idea, every recollection, in a sweetly scented, beautiful web.

People marvel at how much his memory has improved, how witty he has become.

He smiles, and knows his Secret Garden is blossoming behind a strong wall.

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_Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is intended._


	3. Fiendfyre

Ginny knows much better than the others what to do to reach her mindscape.

After all, she's been trapped in there before, while Tom took over her body for his own gain.

She didn't know what was happening back then, but now listening to Hermione's explanation she recognizes all too well what she should do.

And she doesn't want to.

She's never talked about Tom, not really. She's never told anybody how cold and dark his soul was, like a snake or a water dragon slithering in her mind.

She didn't realize it back then, but now she knows that her mind is a cold and damp place, and it is Tom's fault.

She doesn't want to reach her mindscape. She doesn't want to face the memories of the boy who seduced her and betrayed her and still lurks in the back of her conscience, whispering of cold dark caves and chilling humidity and a pond of evil still-water in the darkness.

But she must, and so she steels herself.

And when she goes to her mindscape, she does so with fire at her fingertips.

Warm, hot, burning fire, brightly lighting every corner, devouring every shadow.

Hotter and hotter, until darkness is pierced by blazing flames, until dampness and chilliness are chased away by the all-consuming blaze, until all water evaporates in steaming masses in front of the raging inferno she has created.

And the flames burn higher and higher and she is fascinated by the shapes she can liken them to, until she's not just likening anymore, she's seeing, for the flames have shapes, fierce looking monsters and chimeras and ferocious dragons, and her fire is now fiendfyre, and it's burning everything, smouldering, incinerating, purifying, and all her memories, her thoughts, are turned into fire clay figures glazed with coloured shines, and even the dripping lingering shadow of Tom is at last dried and reduced and exorcised by the unforgiving fiendfyre.

And she's at peace.

Let anyone try and rape her mind again. Her fiery dragons are ever-hungry.

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	4. Chessboard

Ron hates Occlumency.

He finds no sense in the meditation exercises that have him struggling to visualize a stupid candle in a 'void' he doesn't even understand the meaning of.

He doesn't get how 'clearing the mind' could be possible and doesn't see the point in finding one's mindscape anyway.

When they move onto the building of defences and the book Hermione is devoutly reading to them starts talking about walls and fortifications and surrounding one's mind with shields, he gets bored within ten minutes and lets his mind drift back to the last challenging chess match against that Ravenclaw bloke who can really make him work for his victories.

He feels vaguely guilty and uncomfortable, but not enough to go back to the exercise he is supposed to practice.

Until Hermione startles him by rather suddenly insisting they share their progress and describe their mindscapes and caught off guard, he blurts out 'chessboard', because that is what he's thinking about.

He expects reproach and is surprised when instead, Hermione's eyes light up with admiration.

'That's brilliant', she says, 'very original.'

She prattles on about using a game of chess to trap the invaders and slow them down, she expands on hiding memories inside the pieces, the less important in the pawns, the most precious in the king, she recalls McGonagall's giant chessboard back in their first year.

Ron listens in fascination.

This he can understand.

This he can do.

He's good enough that he can adapt his strategy as needed, too, protecting now the knights, then the rooks, sacrificing a bishop to guard the queen or vice versa, in relation to what his challenger – his attacker – is after, to what he can afford to expose and what he must protect.

His mind is a chessboard, and Ron knows he is unbeatable at his game.

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_Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is intended._


	5. Art

Hermione casts about fruitlessly for an image that can suit her and she tries what she thinks are the most obvious mindscapes – a library, the sea, a forest… - but finds them all unsatisfactory. Inadequate, incomplete.

When finally a stray thought brings the perfect choice to her, she is surprised by it and startled at how right it feels.

A modern art gallery takes form slowly in her mind's eye, as if a camera is panning along the white, minimalist rooms where paintings of the most various styles and subjects are shown in airy displays. A few statues can be found too, artistically arranged so that soft golden sunlight pours on them, making them glow.

It is elegant, sophisticated and fresh.

She grew up as high-middle class. She wanted for nothing, but she never knew true luxury. Moreover, her parents consistently chose practicality over aesthetics. Books rather than paintings, technology rather than _objects d'art_. She has nevertheless acquired a taste for the beautiful and the artistic, filling her eyes with the stylish photographs of trendy furnishing magazines and with the works of art in the museums she visits.

Now she walks through the _salles_ of her mindscapes and slowly sorts her thoughts and memories in masterworks of different artists.

Chagall for her friends, and for the adventures they share.

Klimt for her emotions. Kandinsky for her original thoughts, for her intuitions and theorizations.

The Italian Renaissance Artists for her vast and diverse knowledge – Leonardo for the Theory of Magic, Michelangelo for Transfiguration, Caravaggio for the darker side of Magic, Tiziano for Charms, Masaccio for Muggle sciences…

Even her memories are captured into striking paintings – the happy ones in the sunny colours of Cézanne and Van Gogh, the horrific ones in the twisted shapes of Kokoshka and Munch…

She loves her Gallery, with all its soothing elegance, its quiet style.

She frets about security, though. She fears for her priceless paintings and researches security responses and monitored alarm systems and protection technology like Closed Circuit Television and Laser Safety Barriers and in the end, she just turns to magic instead.

She imagines the whole Art Gallery under Fidelius and puts a projection of an information stand in the forefront of her mind, the girl manning it doubling as Secret Keeper.

Those who seek entrance are politely informed that the Gallery is closed to public, and are left with only innocuous teasers of her secured collection.

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_Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is intended._


	6. Emotions

Occlumency doesn't come easily to Harry.

It takes hard work and sweat and an extenuating effort to clear his mind and perhaps set a few, weak walls in place.

And even when he manages, it is a hollow victory, because it marks no breakthrough: the next day he is back to ground zero.

It is a struggle that never gets easier, an uphill battle with no rest on sight, the epitome of frustration.

It's as if something in the way his mind is built makes it impossible to learn, really learn, how to protect his thoughts.

He tries the step-by-step approach countless times, stubbornly building the required defences time and again, but no matter how often he walks down it, the path is always as difficult as the first time.

Perhaps it is because he feels so intensely.

His emotions are too strong, his memories too vivid. There is no way to store them safely away, no way to ignore them.

He wears his heart on a sleeve, because it is too big, and beating too wildly, to be constrained inside a shielding screen.

But there is strength in this weakness.

Few can withstand such forceful feelings, such wild storms of sensations. Few know how to cope with such strong emotions constantly filling their hearts, lifting it to soar deliriously or plunging it into despair. Few can endure the wild assault of white-hot anger, the terrible emptiness of loss, the unbearable hollowness of grief, or even the fierce burning of love.

Harry can, and he learns to use this.

He welcomes the invaders and shares his most devastating experiences freely.

His secrets are safe because those who seek them can't reach them. They are overwhelmed and succumb long before they can get what they want.

He will never master Occlumency. He is unable to.

But his compensatory tool is brutally effective.

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_Disclaimer: No copyright infringement is intended._


End file.
